


The More I Drink

by damngayboys



Category: The Voice (US) RPF, The Voice RPF
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Blake is famous, Drinking, Lots of alcohol, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 04:06:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6223117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damngayboys/pseuds/damngayboys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And then he saw what must've been the bands best feature by far. For all the excuses he could imagine, from the constant thud of bass in the background to keep the crowd occupied until the band was set up to the way the girls in the crowd rolled and rocked against the guys and caught the attention of every straight man in the room, he couldn't find one valid reason for how he'd missed the piece of heaven that was the bands singer.</p>
<p>-<br/>Adam is singing in a bar, and Blake is drowning his misery and maybe becomes a little bit infatuated with the gorgeous man on stage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The More I Drink

Blake wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten here. That was the case often enough when he went drinking. Going from bar to bar, making mistake after mistake that he'd either regret or forget the next morning. It had happened so often now that even the media lost interest in his edging on self-destructive behaviors, even if there had been some throwaway articles about coping with alcohol and an early grave in the aftermath of his divorce.

This bar in particular wasn't special in any way. Like almost every place he'd frequented when he found that a night alone with his thoughts was too much to handle, all he saw were increasingly clumsy bodies pressed against each other and mediocre drinks passed around. The dim lit lights masked mistakes here as well as they would anywhere else, and he'd been through enough clubs to know that he should be thankful for the clean bar top alone.

That wasn't the entire truth, Blake realized as he pushed past his self-pitying haze long enough to notice a new band taking the stage. It was no one he recognized, of course, but why would it be? Even looking beyond his classically country borders, he couldn't imagine the singers he knew taking a gig like this, even if it was perhaps one of the nicer clubs to be found in the city. But there was something about them, an enticing air that almost coaxed him into joining the dance floor. From the cheers of those sober enough to recognize the group, it appeared that they were regulars, something that only piqued Blake's curiosity more. His kind of club rarely had a regular band, the acts usually managing to get themselves banned with some kind of antics by the second song. For the first time that night, Blake turned away from the beer he was nursing to fully focus on the band.

And then he saw what must've been the band's best feature by far. For all the excuses he could imagine, from the constant thud of bass in the background to keep the crowd occupied until the band was set up to the way the girls moved their bodies against the guys, he couldn't find one valid reason for how he'd missed the piece of heaven that was the band's singer. Everything about him had Blake doing a double take. From the ink that marked his skin to the tears in his jeans, tight enough that he might have once mocked them, though now he found himself wanting to drop everything and thank the lord for their creation. The scantily clad girls were suddenly a blur in the background.

He'd long ago come to terms with the fact that he had eyes for both the ladies and the fellas, though the public was distinctly less aware of that than they probably should've have been for all he preached about pride and acceptance when questioned. Yet he'd never been quite so taken aback at first glance as he was with the mystery singer. Apparently he wasn't the only one, either.

"You too, huh, cowboy?" It was a statement to how quickly the singer's appearance had sobered him up that he managed to spin toward the bartender without even the slightest hint of toppling over, despite being well into a night of drinking away everything from his sorrows to his ability to see straight. Blake gave a lopsided, sheepish grin at the question, gesturing wordlessly toward the singer as though the other's appearance would suffice better than words could begin to. "Just about every straight girl and gay guy that come in here leave with heart eyes. Hell, I've seen Adam over there take straight men and bend the meaning of the word for a night. It's like friends with benefits, straights with exceptions."

Adam, he noted. The beautiful man's name was Adam.

He didn't quite know whether he should take comfort in that, the knowledge that he was not the only wide-eyed fool to have his heartbeat stutter whenever he caught another perfect glimpse of the singer. If he'd thought he'd stood even the slightest of chances before, which was already enough of a stretch that it would take more than an obscene amount of alcohol to delude him into that hope, it was gone now.

"Speakin' from experience, there?" he asked, looking over the man behind the bar as though sizing him up. Was he the sort of person who Adam would take home? It didn't take more than a second to see that of course the bartender was exactly the kind of person he could imagine with the young, muscled singer. He'd been wrong, before. There had been a glimmer of hope before, but even that had disappeared in the face of the worn out bartender. If a man as attractive as him had been so easy for Adam to play around with and drop, than Blake wasn't going to be even a blip on the radar for him.

The bartender simply laughed, topping Blake's drink off with a knowing smirk, as though to say 'you're going to be here a while.' It wasn't inaccurate. From the moment he'd spotted Adam, the thought of standing and leaving never flickered through his mind. "Could do with a little more experience with that one."

Blake gave a chuckle of agreement at the response, chalking it up to mean one of two things. Neither one was a particularly appealing option though he found one indisputably better. Either nights of watching Adam had left the poor man with only a desire shared by every soul with eyes in the club or he'd gotten a taste that had left him longing for more.

If he'd thought it was bad just watching the singer as the band set up, bouncing in his place and hands on the mic stand, which gave Blake some obscene mental images of all the other places he wanted to see those hands, he didn't have words to describe what it was like to finally hear the man sing. For a moment, he swore that he'd passed out at the bar, downed one too many shots and delved into an imagined reality where all his wants and lusts were embodied by one perfect, gorgeous man. And that thought was terrifying. Surely after that kind of a fantasy, nothing real could possibly sate him now, like a man tasting the food of the gods and being left to starve when he returned to the paltry scraps humanity had to offer. Every other man and woman in the world were scraps compared to the man at the microphone. But Adam was nothing of God, whether real or a dream. This man must've come from the devil. Must've been crafted specifically for him, made up of everything he'd been warned about in church, made so Blake would have no other choice but to face him and give in to all the sex and sin and lust and greed that had been crashing over him from the moment Adam took the stage. Never before had Blake wanted so badly to have someone make a sinner out of him.

From the twisting mood of the club around him, as hushed and enraptured as drunken twenty somethings could get before waves of energy ran through the crowd, it was easy to tell that each patron had fallen under Adam's spell every degree that Blake had. God, how could they have not? Every detail, every piece of Adam was so, so ridiculously unfair. How was it that one person could have both that voice and that body? It was one of the worst injustices he'd ever witnessed, really. How were the odds so stacked against everyone but him?

The song wasn't one he knew, and it took a few moments of logical thought (It was harder to string together anything than he would've expected. Not for the drinks he kept knocking back but how every few moments Adam caught his attention and he had to fight to put his focus to anything but the man on stage.) to realize that it must be an original. One that must've been written by the drummer, or a friend of the group, anyone but the frontman. There was unfair, and there was just plain cruel, and having one man be that talented landed firmly on the cruel side of the line. Regardless of who had written the song, every word only added to the temporary infatuation he'd somehow fallen victim to, from the opening that had nearly silenced the club to the striking way Adam's voice wrapped around Animals.

By the time Animals finished, Blake had regained his buzz from before Adam knocked the sobriety into him by sheer power of good looks. He leaned back against the bar, unabashedly taking in every moment of singing and frankly obscene dancing against the microphone stand. He watched constantly, steadfastly unwilling to avert his gaze for longer than it took to glimpse whatever the latest brawl was between drunken middle aged men was across the bar and to get his drink refilled. Once upon a time, he'd have worried about running himself dry from such mindless, constant drinking (The club owners must have loved Adam for all the income he brought in. Blake was far from the only one too enraptured to stop and consider each fill.), but he found himself finally taking advantage of the disposable income that had been wasting in a bank account since his first CD came out. Song after song passed, yet his fascination never faded, only grew. He couldn't help but once again turn toward the bartender to ramble away until things began to make sense once more.

"Is it always like this, with him here? How do you manage to work with that happening twenty feet over?" he asked with a raised brow, drinking his beer and finding it in him to at the very least focus on pacing himself better.

"Practice?" the bartender responded, more of a question than a definitive answer. He couldn't very well blame him for it, either. Not when he glanced away from the bar long enough to see Adam's hips rocking against the mic stand, erotic to the point of making Blake (and just about everyone else in the club) just a little more uncomfortable in their jeans.

"I've got some bad news for you," Adam announced, voice just breathy and wrecked enough from the constant performing to have Blake closing his eyes and thinking of anything but the ways he could wreck Adam's perfect voice. "I've run out of songs to sing." The deflation in the crowd was near instantaneous at the idea of Adam going away, leaving and taking the electric air and pooling lust with him. "Now, come on. Have a little faith in me, why don't you?" The performer in him had to admire how easily Adam worked a crowd, filling the room with energy with a single note or a teasing chuckle and controlling it all so finely that it seemed that without him up on that stage, everything would somehow fall apart. "Bring your requests, then, even got the karaoke thing set up with the words." He laughed, breathless and riding the energy of the frenzied room as he pointed out where to direct the inevitable flood of requests.

He wasn't quite sure when it happened. The night quickly turning into a haze of alcohol and the walking sex on a stick that was Adam, but at some point, Adam had noticed him. It was hard not to, honestly. Everything about Blake, from how he towered over everyone in the audience to the cowboy hat he'd found himself pulling on earlier in the night when he was just drunk enough to think everything was a good idea, stuck out like a spot of black on a pure white sheet when he stood beside the drunken masses of twenty somethings and bitter men.

If it was easy to tell why the singer had noticed him, it was a thousand times simpler telling that Blake had been picked out of the crowd and was now subject to the city boy's constant teasing, despite not knowing Adam beyond having familiarized himself with his body as best as humanly possible from the painfully long distance between them. Blake couldn't even bring himself to be ashamed about this boldfaced drunken ogling, not when Adam found it necessary to throw his shirt off to the side of the stage halfway through a song. Something about being the subject of Adam's teasings made the experience both insanely enjoyable and a new level of misery. Their gazes locked as Adam made Dirty Little Secret one of the best songs he'd ever heard, and as the singer's body moved with an ease Blake had never quite seen before, in body rolls that should not have been nearly as erotic as he somehow made them, and, for all he tried to appreciate it (and damn was it something to appreciate), he couldn't help but wince slightly and shift his shirt as best as he could to cover the strain in his jeans.

Blake had never reacted this way, not from simply watching a show. He'd always been a man of touch, needed to have hot skin under his hands and a keening body below his to lose himself to lust, but Adam had a way of flying past that with just wide, dark eyes and a sinful appearance. Of course, he wanted to touch Adam more than anything, to pull him away from the crowded bar and make him his. Needed to get his hands on him, and never pull them away again. He wanted Adam as his own dirty little secret.

Maybe he was feeling a little masochistic that night. Maybe he'd been feeling a little masochistic since Miranda had left, if he was honest with himself. How long he'd been at this point, he wasn't sure, but he knew it was on Adam for bringing out the worst in him. He couldn't be blamed for having fallen victim to the singer's infinite charms, from the cute half-grin on his lips that must've come from a love of performing (even at a club) to the devilish way his eyes fluttered closed when he hit a perfect note or rolled through a particularly erotic line. Still, he could be blamed for having the brilliant, whiskey-driven idea of requesting a song of his own.

He took that idea to the request line, stumbling slightly under the influence of one (five) too many drinks, ignoring the drunken girls slurring on about climbing him like a tree or riding a cowboy. He did spare one girl a chuckle at the blatant question of whether his cock was as big as the rest of him, paying them no mind beyond that. How could he with the beauty up on stage? In any other circumstance, he'd have pulled one of the girls from the crowd by now, sweet-talking her into his arms and bed with a blatant abuse of his country charms and thick accent. Even the thought of a random warm body in his bed, letting him pretend that it wasn't going to be cold and empty by the time he awoke the next morning, had lost its appeal since Adam had taken the stage.

The realization threw him off for a moment. Surely he was being ridiculous and the feeling would pass when he awoke in the morning, whether he gave in and had someone for the night or not. Lust alone had never hit him so strongly, even when he considered the fondness that somehow overcame him as he watched the other break from dancing just long enough to laugh with the drummer over something and every time he caught the light in his eyes as the crowd bounced along and cheered.

Pushing the thought aside, he made his request, a selfish one that the majority of the crowd wouldn't quite appreciate but one that might still drive Blake mad to see Adam perform. After that song, he vowed to himself, he wouldn't spend the rest of his night staring at the singer. He'd either resort to the standard pattern of his nights, pulling a pretty girl from the crowd and giving her a story to tell her friends the next day about screwing around with a famous country singer, or leave and pass out when he got home. He was certainly drunk enough for either, at this point, but he wasn't drunk enough to use up more of his dignity admiring the singer's every move for much longer.

At least, that's what he thought before Adam got to his request. The songs before it had been much of the same, top 40s hits about perfect bodies and sex. They would've bored Blake by now, each a different phrasing of the same concept, a concept that felt much better in practice than in song, if it hadn't been for who it was performing them, turning every lyric into a musical drug.

When he first heard the words slip from his lips, Blake almost thought his song had been skipped over. Never had he heard one of his songs sped like this, tune changed so it seemed more to be toeing the line between pop and rock than coming anywhere near country. Damn him if he could find a reason to complain about it, either, with the way the unexpected change had him spinning away from the bar to watch the band with wide, shock and want filled eyes. When he'd first decided he wanted to hear Adam sing one of his songs, this was not what he envisioned. How could he have predicted this perfect manipulation? Everything about the singer was unpredictable, from his high, rockstar voice to his constantly changing energy, jumping from overcharged excitement to pure sexual drive, always just as Blake was finally adjusting to one or the other.

Why was Adam hitting him this hard? He hadn't felt this strongly before, even when he first met the woman who would later become his wife. He'd never been at such a pitiful state, so lost for words and awed by her presence. Why was it that Adam had that kind of a hold over him despite never having uttered a word to him? He shook off the thought, finishing off the beer in his hand and blaming the alcohol alone for his unprecedented infatuation with the singer. Nothing else seemed like a valid reason if he gave it a moment's worth of logical thinking. Objectively, Adam was just a handsome man with a good singing voice.

Adam's breathy tone pulled him from his thoughts once more, and Blake was reminded that he'd never been good at objectivity in the face of beauty.

For every word that Adam sang, Blake's resolve to leave weakened further, crumbling under the singer's talent and his all too knowing eyes. It hadn't been subtle to request his own song. It was as though he'd taken a giant neon sign saying 'I'm into you' and promptly hung it above his own head, if he was honest with himself. Surely, Adam understood how weak Blake was to his wants after he'd made it clear how badly he wanted to see the singer do anything that could connect them, give them even the slightest reason to talk, to be closer than a singer and a drunk man in the audience.

The vast majority of his nights out ended long before the bar began to empty. Often, he'd found someone to take home and was halfway to a temporary paradise with them or he'd lost out in the battle to drown his misery and ended up half conscious and being dragged from the bar by a friend (or a team of them. He'd never been small, and the constant drinking was far from being a miracle diet). Still, Adam's blatant destruction of his plan to leave and his constant dancing had Blake at the bar long after the majority of the crowd had paired off or stumbled home.

He'd slowed on the alcohol when the band became blurs, sipping at it occasionally to be sure his staring didn't step over the line between appreciation and creepy, but he was still considerably drunk when the club was left holding only the last wave of drinkers, those needing to push it to last call to avoid confronting what was waiting for them (and those with nothing at all waiting for them when they closed the doors). The constant music had slowed, Adam taking time to play at conversations with the drunken patrons, laughing and dancing and dragging out the last few song requests as the clock pushed further to the end of the night. Blake couldn't imagine how someone so clearly born to be a performer and have flocks of fans was wasting his talent at a bar.

This, Blake could appreciate more than even the pure energy of the beginning of the nights, when it seemed as though adrenaline had replaced the blood in their veins and every decision was a good one. This was easier, and more familiar, reminiscent of the honky tonks just off of every Oklahoman highway he knew, where the performers and the crowd meshed together less like idol and fan and more like neighbors, though nothing about Adam or the bodies lingering on the dance floor gave even the faintest semblance of Blake's country roots. When it got to this point, he could even look past his initial impression of Adam as the Adonis in a band and instead focus on the few traits that had him staying through the night: his laugh, his easy upbeat nature even at the time of night reserved for those with too many demons to let themselves rest, everything Blake had at first ignored to focus soley on the wet dream-worthy body in front of him was coming together. He wasn't sure he'd hold onto whatever impression of stability he'd pulled together in the wake of his divorce when Adam left.

As much as he loved watching this version of Adam, for the first time seeming as though he was meant to walk among people rather than the gods, Blake couldn't help but be worried. The feelings in his gut weren't unfamiliar, though they felt different in the aftermath of Miranda, and they had only led him to trouble before (trouble that, ironically enough, included getting down on one knee for a woman who would leave him not long after). They were warm, and felt good, despite also bringing about a soft ache from the distance between himself and Adam, and they were dangerous. Someone with as much power over him as Adam so easily wielded could do a lot of damage, considering the way Blake fell, hard and fast and, most importantly, entirely. Still, watching the singer with vaguely wary eyes, he found himself compelled to put all of his faith and trust into him.

It had to be clear in his eyes just how easily Adam pulled him in and how little Blake minded, if the sympathetic look on the bartender's face was any indication. He must've been a king of fools to believe he was any different than the few sad souls sat not far from him, each watching Adam with tired, wanting eyes.

"You've got it bad, don't you, cowboy?" the man behind the bar sighed, commiserating with him as he likely did with every man who came through the bar and found they had eyes for Adam. "Head home. Get your head on straight, before you wake up hurting." Whether he was referencing the hurt of not having Adam or the inevitable hangover that would rule Blake's world in the next morning, he wasn't sure. Blake wasn't even sure which would be a worse pain.

The fear of never coming closer to Adam than a requested cover and some shared glances fueled his next decision even more than the copious amounts of alcohol he'd consumed over the course of a night much longer than he'd ever intended it to be, though it was a close match. Inevitably, the bar shut down, the band left the stage and the bartender herded away those who remained, but Blake still didn't go home. Not without at least a few words to Adam, at the very least questioning why he was at a bar rather than in a studio or touring the world.

Rather than flagging down one of the few taxis that rolled along at this time of night, Blake leaned back against the outside wall, taking the cool air on his face as a much needed aid to bring back some shred of sobriety he'd long before chased away. He didn't know what he was going to say when he saw the singer, thoughts muddled and cloudy at best, but he would figure it out when the other came out, he was sure. Adam had a way of knocking the sense back into him (and taking it away just as soon as he did) and he doubted that had faded when they left the bar.

Just as he predicted, the previously lost ability of coherent speech came flooding back into him when the singer stepped outside, unaccompanied by the band (He could thank God for that alone) and still shirtless (and that) though he had gained a jacket. Still, both for a fear of slurring and his few worded nature, he simply greeted him with a slight grin. "Hey, rockstar. That was.." He gestured wordlessly, knowing his fascination was clear enough that his intentions could easy be understood without a word.

All Adam offered him was a chuckle. "Certainly was..." he teased. Blake damn near blushed, diverting his gaze from Adam's eyes to instead again run his eyes over the singer's body, which was only that much better the closer he got to him. He couldn't be blamed for being slow with his words, not when confronted with this spectacular, unfair kind of beauty that he'd never come close to seeing before.

"Oh, y'know what I meant," he defended, accent coming in thicker in his attempts to seemed infinitely more pulled together than he was at the moment. Adam's resulting grin was just devilish enough to make it clear to Blake that his valiant efforts were for naught. Adam could see right through him.

"Sure do, cowboy." For a moment, Adam's eyes lit up, almost as though he'd concocted some kind of evil plan in what had to be a brilliant mind (Nothing about Adam had been less than perfect so far, from Blake's point of view. Why would his mind be any less than?). Blake couldn't bring himself to be worried, or suspicious, still filled with a foolish, idealistic kind of trust in the man he didn't know, and a judgement clouded by alcohol and arousal.

If he had been a little more sober, and the other man had been a little less Adam, maybe Blake would have noticed how he only began moving closer after the mystery idea had hit him. Maybe he would've paid a little more mind to the way Adam went from standing near the doorway to leaned up against the wall, just inches away, but without a hint of soberness in sight he couldn't think beyond thanking whatever lord had created the man in front of him and brought him so close.

The quiet banter between them came easily, despite Blake's slowed processing and how distracted he was.

"Did a hell of a job on my song," he murmured as he fought to keep his gaze north of Adam's chest and away from his petal pink lips.

"Someone had to save the poor thing," Adam teased softly. "Those lyrics deserved a reprieve from that country drawl."

How they faded from quiet teasing into being pressed together, Blake, for once, not minding how he had to bend and stoop to enjoy a kiss from someone shorter than him, he wasn't sure. Hell if he wasn't grateful, though, and becoming more so with every passing second. He was half convinced their lips had been made for each other, Adam tasting like sweet sugar and bad decisions all at once as he turned their hot bodies, pressing him back against the wall and letting his hands finally map the inked, muscled terrain he'd been watching for hours.

Kissing Adam was too good to be true. He groaned softly into the other's mouth at the thought of how everything else they could do would compare. This was only the beginning. He could feel Adam's body reacting beneath him, the sharp rise and fall of his chest the moment they split and the way he melted into Blake's touch, and there was so much more he wanted to do the perfect body he'd been blessed with the ability to touch.

Wrapped up as he was in kissing Adam, he'd never had begun to expect what was coming next. It was a cruel twist of fate, one that the other singer had surely been planning from the moment he came close and pressed their bodies together. As the heat of their kiss grew, bodies hot and close and Blake desperate to have Adam in his bed rather than against a bar wall, the singer's nimble hands pushed him back just enough to slip away and head for the doorway where his band would file out just a few seconds later.

The image of Adam, red lipped and looking perfectly debauched from just a few short minutes of making out, would be the only thing Blake saw when he closed his eyes for what would surely be years to come. As the band filled a car that was already waiting there for them, he groaned out a lust-filled, alcohol-fueled 'fuck' and hit the wall behind him. He had to have more, he already knew, he was going to know every inch of that perfect body even if he had to die trying.

**Author's Note:**

> quick important things: huge thanks to CaptainKenway for beta-ing this, and generally being lovely about it all. this story shares it's name with one of my favorite Blake songs, The More I Drink. I'm not sure when the next chapter will be up, but I'm hoping to do one every weekend. and of course, thanks to anyone who read it and comments/kudos-es, it means a ton.
> 
> I'm on tumblr at rockstarandcowboy, if you want to talk or request a fic.


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